The job

If you leave out the left-handed virtuosic rock blues guitar playing, adoring fans, tours, recording sessions, millions of dollars, setting guitars on fire, flashy clothes, and drugs, there is very little difference between what I do for a living and what Jimi Hendrix did--oh, and I guess you need to add accounting book editing.

Here is a case in point: Today I found the following in one of my author’s manuscripts:

However, that raises an obvious question: Wouldn’t a FIN 48 determination that a tax position is not more-likely-than-not sustainable upon examination be inconsistent with a taxpayer’s assertion for tax purposes that the position is based on a reasonable belief that the position is more-likely-than-not proper?

In my world, not only is that an obvious question, our book answers it. My author is grammatically correct, although we are disparaging contractions in this particular publication. That isn’t the toughest sentence I have ever seen, although it is the toughest one I’ve seen today. I need to eliminate the contraction and make the material more readily accessible to our readers. Every editor in the world would propose a different solution. Anyway, I will confer with my author about my suggested fix, and we will mutually find a way to alleviate my concerns.

Now, ignore all that: If you want to see the kind of awesome post that make me question why I even bother blogging, there’s this.

Rebelión en la granja

I have read so many things since I last posted What Tony is reading that I won’t list them. Life goes on. At home, where I actually concentrate, I am still reading Great Expectations. I had never read Dickens before, and I heard that this was his most complex novel. In the morning on the subway I am brushing up my German for a trip I expect to take this fall. On the way home I am dividing my time between reading things my friends wrote and some essays by George Orwell.

The other night I was reading Orwell's essay “The Prevention of Literature,” which he published in January of 1946. Orwell always has sentences that stand out: “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature” and “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox”--and if you don’t agree with such statements, they appear in a persuasive essay that you have the right to read. As so much of Orwell does--or, for that matter, good essay writing--the theme took me on a few unexpected turns, such as how liberals end up advancing totalitarianism. At over 60 years old, some of the paragraphs apply, intact, to civil liberties questions we face today in the ever-widening war on terror.

And then I heard the news about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s latest constitutional reforms, I could only think of Orwell’s Animal Farm, which besides being a political fable is also a brilliant illustration of how one--a nation, let’s say--can find oneself at the bottom of a slippery slope with no idea how one got there. It is simply a matter of time before the Venezuelan people look in the window of the farmhouse and see that the pigs are living exactly as Mr. Jones did.

I'm still here

I hate that I haven't posted for so long; here is a roundup: On Big Wednesday (August 8th, when we had all the rain), it took me 4 hours to get to work. When I phoned my boss at 10 a.m. to say that I had only made it to 145th St. and was walking through Harlem toward a bus stop, she said "Why don't you have breakfast, and if the trains still aren't moving downtown, go home?" Answer: I don't know how to be me. The bus was amazingly slow because all of Manhattan was a traffic jam. I was tempted to write about that, but remember, Homer only wrote the Odyssey, he didn't have to actually do it.

On Friday I woke up with a cold that was so bad I actually called in sick, something I hardly ever do. I stayed in bed most of the day setting a world record for a sinus headache. I was so incapacitated that when I was listening to a talk show on public radio that I hated, I just lay there and listened to it because the thought of crossing the room and turning the damn thing off barely seemed possible. At that point I wondered whether in fact I had contracted the flu, possibly from all the people I was cooped up with on that bus for three hours on Wednesday.

I got out on Saturday, bought some groceries, ran some errands, back to bed--I never set foot out of my apartment again till Monday morning, when I went to work. I got a little writing done on Saturday. I did a lot of sleeping. Normally I think of sleeping as unproductive, an overly Protestant notion that I am still recovering from. My new ethos is: More sleep = more dreams.

I spent Sunday in my pajamas and worked on my memoir. It's coming along well. I seem to just about have the voice down, which means capturing the perspective of me at age 12. Now that the novel is effectively out of my way and I am devoting myself to this project fully, things are coming back to me: things people said, people's last names, food I ate, magazines I looked at. On Sunday night I had an extremely vivid dream of being in my grandfather’s study, which is the room I lived in for six months on an aluminum cot while my family was in transition. I think what struck me most about the dream was that it proved for me that the details are still there in my memory. The other thing that struck me was my total immersion in this project, which is a major reason why I haven't blogged for three weeks.

On Monday, I sooo wanted to see the Penny show at the UCB Theatre, but I was totally run down by the time I finished work. I went home, had a bowl of soup, and crawled into bed at 9 to read Great Expectations for awhile. At 9:30 I turned out my light and was thinking about now the show would be starting any minute. I fell into a dense sleep and when I woke up and saw that it was 3 a.m. I was also in the afterglow of a dream in which I had just seen Penny's performance. The dream wasn't as vivid as being in my grandfather's study and looking at his books--and it couldn't have been as funny as the real Penny show--but I was glad that in some surreal way I had not *wholly* missed the Penny show.

Tonight is Tuesday. We had a boring meeting that lasted two hours late this afternoon. Since I was there to listen, I shut my eyes--which allows me to concentrate more. My boss told me to at least look awake. So, I spent the next two hours staring at the shiny top of the wooden table while four people blathered about problems that will probably be fixed before they have any effect on me. My soul might have drained out of me during those two hours, but I at least I looked awake. Other people in attendance didn't have anything to contribute either--and they probably looked more awake than me. I wish I could go to Harold Night tonight. I can't; I am too tired, although I am not coughing like I was on the weekend. I need to buy groceries on my way home, which might be a challenge. It's 5:45 here at my desk and I just wish I was reading in bed now as my soul wakes up on the floor of a conference room and wanders back to the Bronx to find me. I can't believe I felt so awful about not posting since July 24 that I'm still here.